Chiropractic & Preventative Treatments: What You Need to Know

What You Should Know About Chiropractic, Preventative Treatments and the Benefits of Such

So, you’ve been seeing your chiropractor for the past while and finally have no more pain which was being caused by the issue you sought treatment for in the first place. That’s great! Then why is your chiropractor asking you to come in again?

If you don’t have any more symptoms and feel fine, why should you continue to go back to your chiropractic clinic? The answer lies within what nearly all chiropractors believe in – preventative treatments and ongoing maintenance.

As musculo-skeletal and nervous system experts, chiropractors can provide you with invaluable information on how treat pain in the back, neck and limbs and prevent injury to the soft tissues and joints of your body.

Now that your symptoms are gone, preventative treatments are key to keeping them away for good while at the same time raising your body’s threshold to be able to handle even more stress than before.

Why Preventative Chiropractic Care?

A more resilient, stronger you…

According to the Canadian Chiropractic Association (CCA), studies have shown that seeing your chiropractor for regular check-ups after symptoms are gone can decrease overall long-term healthcare costs and reduce the likelihood of the same injuries from happening again.

When moving into the preventative treatment stage of chiropractic care, practitioners typically provide more in-depth guidance for things such as:

Injury prevention strategy

Nutritional recommendations

Physical activity

… and any other lifestyle changes that would benefit you in the long run. If you choose to follow these recommendations, you should notice becoming more well-equipped to deal with the stresses in your life. Being able to deal with stress and lead a healthy lifestyle is important all throughout life, but it becomes even more crucial when as we age!

Restoring Function

Once your symptoms are under control, the injured area of your body may still not be functioning at 100 percent. Restoring function in the spine, soft tissues and joints is essential to preventing a relapse back into symptoms, which is why many patients choose to continue with preventative treatments.

Depending on your current health, responsiveness to treatments and how well your body maintains the input by the chiropractor afterwards may mean a check-up once every week or perhaps once a month.

A Word on Preventative Treatments…

When somebody has a heart attack, it doesn’t build up and manifest within a 24 hour period… Time Magazine called it the “silent killer”.

I’m using this as an example because health is not just black and white; there is a grey area and the facts are that if the nervous system controls the function of every cell, tissue, organ, and system, then healthy input to the nervous system needs to be a part of a preventative approach to living a long and active life.

Chiropractic helps people realign their spines and extremity joints, creating healthy feedback into their nervous system because a healthy brain best operates on healthy input so there needs to be a 40:1 ratio of input to output. Functional neurologists state, based on the new SPECT scans (a type of nuclear imaging test) and other brain imaging techniques that there needs to be 40 healthy inputs to the brain to have 1 healthy output – a 40:1 ratio. The greatest concentration of neurons to provide this healthy input are in the spinal joints and then the extremity joints.

Healthy alignment through direct nervous system activation and chiropractic adjustments happens by allowing feedback through the spinal cord up into the brain as input where the brain creates a downstream output into the body, realigning and activating acutely injured joints and / or even activating strength and endurance in the soft tissues around all joints, healthy or injured for a strengthening and preventative purpose.